Jacqui Smith was keen to play down the criticism from Sir Michael Scholar, about the misuse of statistics, when answering parliamentary questions yesterday. She admitted only to being ‘too quick off the mark ’ and implied that statistical pernickitiness was detracting from the real achievements of the police in tackling the real problem of knife crime
As disputes between politicians & statisticians go, this one does not match the gravity of Sir Claus Moser’s standing up to Harold Wilson, when the prime minister wanted to change the definition of trade statistics to exclude BOAC’s import of the first 2 Jumbo jets because of the alarming effect this had on the UK’s apparent trade deficit
And Jacqui Smith’s displeasure does not have the same force as that of Margaret Thatcher when she realised that the Retail Prices Index would reflect the large rise in VAT – from 8% to 15% - in Geoffrey Howe’s first budget, but not the offsetting cuts in Income Tax
They do not make statisticians or politicians like that any more
New Labour’s pursuit of headlines, plus journalistic lack of numeracy, plus the widespread belief that anyone can produce statistics with a spreadsheet, a few clicks of a mouse and a survey on a website, have not helped
I wonder if the prime minister, a voracious reader, has read The politics of large numbers by Alain Desrosières, which traces the important a role statistics (state figures) played in the construction of the identity of nation states – today a state can hardly be said to exist without at least a population & a GDP. Undermining trust in the nation’s statistics could equally well work to undermine trust in the state itself
I dislike slippery slope arguments, but please let us not inch closer to a position where statistical claims by our politicians are met by the sort of reaction given to Mugabe’s ‘no cholera here’
